Hank Greenberg Is Thinking Of Unloading AIG Stock

Hank Greenberg, the ex-chairman of AIG (AIG), the guy who made AIG what it is today, hired an investment banker to help him figure out what the company is worth.

He is thinking about unloading the stock. If Hank doesn’t want to own this financial conglomerate - and he knows a lot more about its businesses than you and I ever will - should an average investor own it??

I looked at AIG awhile back, it looks incredibly cheap on price to reported earnings, but its balance sheet has $40 billion “other” lines. Is it “other” good stuff or bad stuff? I don’t know. In today’s environment it’s likely to be the latter.

Comments

[alpha_zeta:]

Greenberg may sell for a number of reasons:
1) needs the money to put into another business
2) AIG conglomerate is so large that it cannot grow so fast (in large percentages)
3) Hank likes control and not afraid to tie his wealth to something he controls; perhaps he should have sold long ago, but the emotional tie and hope for regaining control was too strong. Best to let it go, rather than spend your life fighting and making no progress.
4) If AIG wants to grow it should split up (spin off) some of its businesses. This will cause pain for some business units and allow other units to shine. This is comparable to the ECB which manages interest rates for the region which has some very strong groth economies and other areas which have low growth.... what to do? Status quo / do nothing.

Stopping there, back to other macro and micro items. Cheers.

2008 Jan 23 02:27 PM

[DaveJ:]

In hank sells AIG, it is just because he doesn't control it anymore. He is already extremely rich. He doesn't care about the money. He cares about control.

2008 Jan 28 11:29 PM